As I'm under a respiratory consultant for severe asthma which has not been brought to closure no one would touch me for insurance cover. Eventually, the last hour before I had no other options available to me before I left I got one. I was just pleased I had the medical cover.

I had not reason to suspect that the locks to the villa had been improper fitted (stated by the locksmith).

As I have just ended an 8.5 year relationship with my fiancée you could say that I was distracted. I did go to the insurance broker to sort it out but they had moved and I spent hours trying to find them. It was my intention to try again later. One thing pushed out another and I honestly though I wouldn’t get robbed. So I have the standard £200 limited each of cash leaving us £800 short. Plus the camera, the ring, the watch, iPod classic 160GB, two pair of Timberlands and a leaverman to claim for that goes up to £300 minus £35 excess. We aren’t gonna get it all.

I phone Martin’s Camera shop and explained the situation. The prices have come down but there are prepared to help me out as much as they can.

I had some lovely pictures using the UV and polariser filters stacked - now all gone.

So I guess I will have to see how much I can get.

It maybe a while until I can get back to where I was. Other nick-knacks they stole are not covered so I wil have to take this on the chin.

Lack of time meant no insurance but next time I will not be going to the villa. They set us up. The burglaries are pandemic to the point the police are cracking down hard and have a secret house. They target Brits that leave early and come back late to the villa – so they rob us during the day. But the management company never once gave us a warning of the burglary problem or to advice us to take all belongings with us.
They let up down. They will be on Watchdog if I have any thing to do with it and I gonna slate on my website for lack of duty of care so others may be more the wiser.

That's absolutely awful and I am sure everyone on the forum will feel your pain. I bought my 16-35mm lens from Martins just recently, partly because of your recommendation, and I found them very helpful. I hope they do you some extremely good deals and help you rebuild your photographic arsenal.

I'm sure members will be interested to know whether you will be making any changes to your choices, though possibly that is best discussed in a new thread and/or section. Good luck.

Thanks for your kind words Bob. It put a right downer on the last week of my holiday to Florida (we were having such a great time) but because me and my fiancée had our money stolen we starving and the only way to get a free drink was via the fountains

The only change I think I will make, and the pictures I did take were stolen to were fantastic. I even have the polariser stacked with the UV to get the sky blue by compensating with exposure and it seemed to work great. All gone now.

This is what I would change but let me know what you think

I did have the excellent Canon 24-70mm f/2.8 USM as you know but it was not IS.

Now what I'm thinking is going for the excellent Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 IS USM.

Obviously I’m stink now so I can only get one lens, but do you think this will be a great lens for portraits and general purpose photography. I've read that this is one of the lens that stays on pro's kit for quite some time before a change to a more specialised lens is required.

Any help would be appreciated.

This will be the last time I post until I get new kit so I will leave the new threat alone for the time being.

I'm really pleased with my purchase and the difference that calibration makes is quite amazing. It's definitely not snake oil or smoke and mirrors. The colour is vastly improved with calibration and simply pictures are looking more real.

I have a Pantone huey and I found that once calibrated there was a very noticable difference to the colour profiles on both my 19" Gericom monitor and my 24" iMac screen. Skin tones are much more lifelike and in general the colour in photos seems more correctly saturated

I would highly recommend the huey for it's ease of use and small size. The unit also doubles as an ambient light monitor which adjusts the brightness of your display dynamically to the light in the room. There's a small cradle which it slots into so you can site it by your monitor or in the case of my iMac I've got it stuck on the glass around the border of the screen

The software is very straightforward and once installed it takes all of a minute to get a profile set up and working. The software also reminds you at intervals to re-calibrate your display.

I've not found a restriction on the number of computers you can use this on - I've used it on both of my displays and several of friends and family. It's simply a case installing the software, running the calibration and that's it.

A huey costs between £50 and £70 depending on where you get it from. There is also the huey Pro which manages multiple monitors connected to the same machine.

You may also want to consider the Spyder2express. The unit is quite a lot bigger and doesn't double as an ambient light monitor but is compatible with a piece of software from www.homecinema-fr.com called HCFR colormeter. This allows you to calibrate your television (as used on HDTVtest.co.uk - a TV review site similar in approach to Camera Labs). The Spyder2 costs a bit more but will allow you to get the best out of both your computer screen and your TV.

I'm using a Spider 3 Elite on my MacBook Pro and on the MacBook from my girlfriend and a Print Fix Pro on my Canon iP4500. The results are tremendous!

For the Huey, don't use the light sensor for adjusting in real time under dimm light conditions! What it does, is it squeezes the whole colourspectrum instead of just clipping the darkest black and lightest white! So there ist a quality loss while it does this an it can kill all your efforts to print, what you really see on the Monitor, because when it squeezes the colour, its like kicking your profile!

This is a advice! No ill means!

I love my Spyder 3! But if you just have one monitor at a time, you can stick with the Spider3 Pro and upgrade your software later on, when your going to use more than one Monitor on your computer! The Hardware ist the same except for this nice chrome looking coating of the Elite!